On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland (40 page)

All responded in chorus and clinked their glasses.

‘Will y’ever forget the time we were trying to kidnap Dan Dinny Roe’s champion bull?’ Liam said, pausing in a smile that foretold devilment. ‘The ring slipped out of the bugger’s big snotty nose and there we were, weeing in our trousers, Leo and Paddy and meself, inches from the horns that would soon turn us into three dead matadors. I knew then that if that big bastard didn’t get me, life would turn out grand. And here we all are, all hale and hearty.’

Amid the merriment, Paddy alone held a melancholic bearing.

‘Dan Dinny Roe?’ Cilla said. ‘That must be a hundred years ago.’

‘Nineteen forty-nine, forty-five years exactly?’ Liam slapped Paddy’s knee. ‘A right pair of urchins we were, Leo and meself; isn’t that right, Paddy? Paddy here was a wee
garsún
at the time; we were supposed to be teaching him how to hit the
sliotar
. Long before you young people were even – ’

Liam broke off on Paddy’s doleful sigh.

Paddy lifted his face to the group. ‘No harder day. Day we buried Róisín.’

‘Come on now, Paddy, that’s a long time ago.’ Leo’s hand squeezed Paddy’s shoulder. ‘You’ve no call to trouble yourself. Wasn’t one of us could have changed what happened. Not you or nobody.’

‘Cruel world . . . when you think about it,’ Paddy said. ‘How them things come back at you when you nearly lose someone else.’

‘Paddy, Paddy,’ Cilla said spiritedly. ‘What about the time those Yanks wanted to know about your college degrees? Remember that?’

‘How could I not. I was showing a bunch of politician fellas from America around, when one of them says to me: “And tell me, Pat, what did you major in?” The Salvation Army, says I. Well, they fell out of their chairs laughing at me. A natural born comedian they said I was. So I asked them did they not know about Major Barbara, and they all just looked at me and laughed even more. Right, says I to meself, pack of eejits, I’ll get me own back on you. It’s a play, I told them, Major Barbara, by our own George Bernard Shaw, a true account of history if ever one was written, about a lovely local Aranroe lassie with a flair for battle, Barbara Murphy, a relation of me own from just over the mountain, and honoured in history books ever since as Major Barbara. But the real reason she’s famous, no lie, is because she was Napoleon’s mother, an Irishwoman, something people outside Ireland are never told about. And that’s not all; she was the brains behind all fifteen of her emperor son’s military victories, and he loved her very much, as any good son would. And that’s not even the best of it, not at all, I told these Yankee hot-shot fellas: Major Barbara Murphy Bonaparte is buried under your feet, under the very floor you’re standing on, an ancient burial chamber for Celtic chieftains. So, tread carefully, I told them, she’s known to come back on occasion, and that’s all I have to say about that. Well, I ended up with more free pints of porter than was good for me, lined up from one end of the village to the other. And there’s not a word of a lie in that.’

‘You doing alright, Leo? Liam whispered under the chorus of cheer.

‘Never better. What I did today might’ve helped save a few lives, mine included. Not many days a man can say that.’

‘And Paddy,’ Liam asked, turning the other way, ‘everything alright now?’

‘Dripping wet but well blessed,’ Paddy said. ‘Lot to be said for old pals sitting down before a good fire.’

‘And more to be said for standing up to the rattling sea as we did, the sea of life, no less.’ Liam slipped into melodrama, capturing the attention of all. ‘On a devilish freezing night, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ninety-four, in the wickedest storm of the decade, and a bitter north-westerly snapping and bashing and thrashing, enough to blow the balls off Dan Dinny Roe’s big fecking champ of a lump of a bull, and here we all are, the five of us, despite all that, still here, all alive. What about that! We should never be off our knees thanking God.’

‘Are you a man of the Cloth or what?’ Paddy said above the merriment. ‘Drinking like a bishop and cursing like a common curate.’

‘Talking of storms, Liam,’ Leo said, ‘how’s the good bishop these days?’

‘As smug as St Paul before his hiccup on the way to Damascus.’

‘Never learn to open their eyes,’ Paddy said. ‘Nothing new in that.’

‘Wait! That’s it! My sermon for Sunday.’ Liam’s dramatics again held the group. ‘How easily we reject others, even poor old Bishop Buckley, because of what we see as their limitations, when we should be seeking out the virtue in every soul we meet.’ He paused, turned more serious. ‘It’s a hard station. But that’s Christianity, isn’t it. What the Sermon on the Mount is all about: compassion, do good to your fellow man. Well, what do you think? Too much Mother Teresa? Or bloody brilliant?’

No one answered.

‘A man could waste his life in thoughts like that,’ Paddy said. ‘Or he could go by what his granny taught him and turn out a better man. It’ll take more than fancy sermons to bring Paddy McCann back.’

‘Does that imply, Patrick,’ Liam asked warmly but without a trace of humour, ‘that there is something that would return you to the fold?’

Paddy’s face worked over the question. No one spoke.

‘Thirty years,’ Liam said. ‘Too long to stay angry. You know that.’

A quiet stayed over the group.

‘To Cilla deBurca,’ Leo said, rising to his feet, ‘for all we owe her.’

‘Aye, aye,’ Liam and Paddy called out.

Tony struggled up, indulging Cilla’s gaze, then thrust his glass into the centre.

‘And let’s never forget,’ Leo said. ‘To Tony MacNeill. No better man or braver man walked the roads of this county.’

When the toasting ended, Cilla’s private smile turned to Tony. ‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered. ‘You’re quiet.’

‘Tired, I guess.’ He grimaced unconvincingly.

‘Time for me to be getting home to a warm bed,’ Leo said. He turned to Cilla: ‘You’re alright staying with Lenny?’

‘I’m grand, I told you, no bother at all.’

‘To bed it is, and a story to be told,’ Paddy said, reanimated, and now a little unsteady. ‘Can’t wait to tell Eilish how Jaws nearly got me, ready to have me for his supper he was, but Patrick McCann, once uncrowned champion of all Connacht, boxed the arse off him, and that’s how I’m still alive, Eilish,
mo chuisle mo chroi
, so thanks be to God for all that exercise you made me do.’ His face asked for a verdict.

‘Sure aren’t we all witnesses to every last word of it,’ Liam said.

‘Enough, I’m off.’ Leo’s hand asked for Paddy’s. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ he said. He then reached to each of them. ‘We all have tomorrows. Let’s remember that. And get together again soon, the lot of us.’

‘Taxi’s waiting, Liam; y’all set there?’ Paddy said.

The priest held up his glass, and in the other hand an untouched pint of stout.

‘Can you credit that,’ Paddy said. ‘The Cloth counts for nought any more. All that bad language out of you, then you guzzling back the demon drink.’

Liam made a show of knocking back what was left in the nearly empty glass. His hands then moved in blessing over the new pint of black-and-cream porter, before he slid it in front of Cilla.

Then Paddy, Leo and Liam, their clothes steaming, headed for the exit, tangled in banter.

Cilla and Tony pulled closer to the fire, remained quiet for a while and restrained in their expressions.

‘How are you feeling now?’ she asked.

He shrugged, kept his eyes on the fire.

‘Exhausted, I’m sure y’are, after . . . after everything.’

He sank back in the chair, expressionless.

‘Tony, I want – ’

‘I don’t want to be thanked,’ he said. ‘You don’t know me. No one does. Not what’s inside me.’

A minute later she turned back to him with unconcealed warmth. ‘I do know one thing. I know if you didn’t do what you did, none of the four of us would be alive. I mustn’t thank you for that? It’s only me who knows what you did, no one else at all. In the water, at Finger Rock, in the boat. I saw you. Your face. The pain in it. I was crying for you inside me. When we got to shore, that was better than getting into heaven.’

‘I did it for Lenny.’ He pushed up off the chair, stood in front of the fire.

Cilla’s face held its strength, her eyes staying on him. For a while they remained detached.

‘Want to walk over with me, see how Lenny’s doing?’ she asked. ‘Let that poor Dr Lappin go home to his bed. Is your leg up to it?’

‘I need to see Lenny alone. Follow after me in a few minutes, if you want.’ He limped off, leaving her alone at the hearth.

At the apartment the doctor was ready to leave. There was nothing to be overly concerned about, he told Tony. Lenny was sleeping soundly and should feel better after the rest. However, someone should ring him in the morning before bringing her to his surgery for tests.

Minutes later, in search of a bathroom, Tony pushed in the door of an adjoining parlour, Persian-rugged and rich, it was a room he hadn’t reached in his break-in. From the head of a long table he surveyed the setting: antiques, plush sofas, cabinets of crystal, abstract sculptures, paintings. He ejected himself abruptly from his reverie.

At Lenny’s bedroom door he listened, looked in, then tiptoed in. Gone were all the photographs that had filled the room previously. Just the picture from their day at Killadoon remained, atop the wicker stand. Here was his Lenny, he thought: asleep, peaceful, beautiful, her face and hair goldened by a bedside lamp, a healthy blush in her cheeks, eyelashes dark and long, her slim form seductive even now. The woman he loved. Who, he knew, he’d go through it all again for: Lenny, alive, well, with a future. What more could he ask? He leaned closer until his face felt the warmth of her breath, and he placed the lightest kiss on her temple. The rare highs and many lows of his life paraded before him, and all the lessons he had learned, particularly in the past year. Out of this reality, he stared into her with all his feelings, with all their hopes and dreams of togetherness, then he closed his eyes and withdrew.

From the wicker stand he lifted her straw satchel and stole out of the room. In her wallet he found ninety-five pounds. He took seventy. As he replaced the satchel he kept from looking at her, or at their Killadoon photo.

Outside, in spitting rain, the wind rattled the trees all around the grounds. Cilla stepped out of the shelter of her car. ‘Everything alright?’

‘Sleeping. Doctor left, said she’ll be fine. He’ll run tests in the morning; you need to call him early.’

She moved into the glow of the hall light. ‘Where are you going now?’

He stared at her.

‘Something wrong? What is it? What?’ By degrees her features tightened. ‘You’re leaving! You’re not leaving! Tony!’

His eyes fled to a starless sky.

‘Bloody idiot! Eejit! Open your mind. Everybody here loves you. Can you not see that?’ Her voice then changed. ‘Lenny loves you. I’ve known that from day one. You can’t just go and leave us.’

‘Things I have to do.’

‘That’s stupid. What do you have to do? Just stay, that’s all. This place needs you, you changed things here. Before you know it, it’ll feel like home. You’ll never want for friends, or work, not after today. Please, Tony.’

The silence between them endured moments longer. Then his head shook. ‘Things I have to do,’ he said, slipping his backpack onto his shoulder. ‘Told you you don’t know me.’

‘Don’t you try that on me. Your face is a dead giveaway. You’re afraid, Tony MacNeill. What are you afraid of? What? Why won’t you trust me? I trusted you, didn’t I? Didn’t I?’

He walked away.

‘Wait! Tony!’

He pulled up but didn’t turn.

‘Let’s talk. I want to talk. That’s all I want from you. Stay tonight, please.’

His head shook again.

‘Tell me we haven’t been friends. Go on, say it. I bet you can’t. I’ve been your friend, haven’t I? Tony?’

He drew the night air into his lungs. ‘Just let me go, Cilla.’

‘No, I won’t. I’m not like that; I thought you knew. Stay down at my place. You know where the key is; you’re the only one who knows.’

He strode away from her.

She ran forward, caught his arm. Their eyes engaged intensely. ‘What’s turned you like this; what are you angry at? I want to help. Let me help. You trust me, don’t you?’

‘You risked your life,’ he said. ‘Remember? At twenty-three. Something felt worth it. You’re okay now. I’m not. Not till I do what I need to do. Nothing will stop me. No one.’ He shrugged out of her reach, limped away.

She watched until the dark consumed him. Then she watched the dark. Later, inside the apartment, she found a folded note with her name on it.

Cilla:

Doctor said call him in morning.

If I don
’
t see you, I had to leave tonight. I hope to come back in two or three days.

Please be sure to tell Lenny. Anto.

24

Dublin City

He had thought long and healed well, quiet and alone at a small farmhouse B&B on Achill Island. Now, after almost three days of wilful recuperation, he was ready. His well-strapped thigh felt safe. His bones and muscles had lost nearly all their soreness, though not yet his blistered hands, but even this could no longer curb his compulsion, or his urgency.

Under an overcast sky he moved through streets of intent Dubliners, faces that he imagined had been chiselled by the city, made raw by its roughness. But it would always be his, this city. Down the breezy quays he paced, green army jacket flapping. After O’Connell Bridge he cut through an alley, came out by the Abbey Theatre, and entered the tiny and time-worn Flowing Tide bar.

In its sole toilet cubicle, amid the hiss of cisterns and the stench of porter, his pocket knife sliced six feet off a new roll of stretch bandage. He split the strip down its length and began wrapping his hands. Right first, then left, his ritual as a teenage fighter at the Railways Boxing Club, less than a half mile from these scrawled walls. Today, trainerless, his teeth tightened the knots on both wrists. He broke into a fighting stance, chin tucked in, jabbing straight, throwing hooks, uppercutting. And once again he waited to be called, hanging for the cue to start his journey to the ring, through the racket of a raucous audience fanatical for their man. And soon it came: Anthony MacNeill. Head up, arms loose, shoulders rotating, in the rising din he started out, hardened by the hoots of abuse, the boos and cheers, faces of scorn and awe and envy. Now climbing up, padded canvas underfoot, in through the ropes, into an over-bright ring, and the bell sounded, and out from his corner he pushed, out through the glass-and-brass door of the Flowing Tide bar, into Dublin city.